Gesture Bending, refers to the poetic transformation, prolongation and enrichment of gestures through staged and unstaged technical mediation of movement and here specifically through the incorporation of responsive sound instruments/environments.

A Gesture Bending event dynamically transforms the potential affective, emotional, and symbolic charge of a gesture in real-time. It can for example lead to the signification of an empty gesture or abstraction of an inherent signifier. A Gesture Bender can synthesize conditions that invite inhabitants to synergetically improvise with a hybrid expressive force to create experimental events and multidimensional compositions.

Contact

Gesture Benders invite audiences to sculpt musical events via gestures and with particular emphasis on tactile engagement with sonified matter. While drawing sound out from given objects through physically interacting with them, one discovers how nuances in physical movement can create intricate sonic textures.

Gestures transmute objects into sound, augmenting their materiality. Through interactively varied augmentation of the object’s natural acoustical response, the ”synthetic” and the “natural” collapse in performative sonics. The inhabitants’ gestures not only lead to unexpected musicality but to narratives about shaping relationships with the world.

Bending the Everyday

The goal is to invest, augment, and sonify various indeterminate rhythms of the body, nature and the environment to create events that are objective yet playfully personal. Benders do not convey any particular narrative or propaganda about life and matter but instead structure a performative and affective field to potentially reactivate repressed singularities, destabilize the capitalist normalization of behaviour, and bring into the foreground our emotionally complex relations to the body, matter, movement, time, and the eco-life.

We often render every action with similarity and indifference. "Bending" can distance a gesture from its usual appearance. Thus every movement and every gesture is reinvented with maximum difference. This difference is not brought about as an appearance but as a dynamic event. The goal is to liquefy the fixedness of forms and the virtual reality (casual efficiency) of consumerist perception and resurface every gesture as a dynamic event, full of relational indeterminacy.

When everyday gestures are perceived artfully in their most open form, they loose their "real" (virtual) appearance to an eventful becoming and then repressed structures of subjectivity are allowed to emerge from the horizon.

liberation

Gesture Bending aims to aesthetically decompose the discursive chains within the gestural and behavioural universe and to re/detache signification to/from perceptions and common sentiments. New sensations and new relations need to be originated to liberate the nearby percepts and affects from the discursiveness that often dominates standardized mentalities and common perceptions. It is from liberated perceptions that radical subjectivities are shaped.

Re-charge

Aesthetic decentralization of stereotyped everyday events or components of expression will deconstruct the discursive code in use and will disconnect the material functions of power from the materiality of basic sensations. Sometimes after gestures are bent, specially after intensely sensational and "cruel" moments, after the decentralization of power has taken place, re-composition of forces and motifs can take place and new existential territories can be invented.

The audience is given a chance, a relational field, to extract new and unbounded forms, meanings, affects and percepts from the otherwise familiar situations. The emergent mental modalities are more likely to be in closer contact with ecological and mental complexities of socio-gestural behaviour than if they were left centralized and directed by the subjugated tonality of standardized mentality. Through the "autopoiesis of aesthetic affects" new ways of living emerge from the gesture bending event and spread through the world.